Construction of buildings, such as apartments and small office buildings frequently utilize techniques wherein large surface areas must be covered with sheathing, as for example, plywood. This necessitates substantial nailing wherein, for reasons of economy, powered nailing devices are employed to reduce the time and labor required for nailing of plywood sheathing to supporting joists or rafters. For this purpose, a variety of air powered nailing guns have been developed in an attampt to bring a degree of automated fabrication to the building construction industry.
All of the air powered nailing devices incorporate a basic driving mechanism which is automatically fed with nail type fasteners which are carried in a suitable magazine. Operation of the nailing devices require that a worker manually support and apply the nailing gun to the work surface. An automatic firing mechanism is usually porvided so that contact of the gun nose with the work surface will result in actuation of the mechanism for driving of a nail into that surface. As will be readily apparent, there is still a substantial amount of manual labor that is required to utilize a nailing gun of this type. The worker must physically carry and support the gun, and this can only be effectively accomplished in a very tiring, stooped or kneeling position. The worker must also carry the gun along a relatively straight line for substantial distances and place the gun in contact with the work surface at specified intervals to maintain a required nail spacing. This means that the worker must have some means of guidance as to the nail spacing which either requires additional manual labor in setting up or the worker will merely estimate the distance at which the nails are to be driven. The latter technique usually results in the worker estimating at a relatively closer spacing, and this works a further economic disadvantage in that a greater number of nails are utilized than that required or specified.